Posted
by
timothy
on Friday December 10, 2010 @09:03AM
from the go-go-spacex-crew dept.

Zitchas writes "Following the news of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket with a Dragon module on-board, and its arrival on orbit, we now have the news that is has successfully re-entered the atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific. As their website proudly claims, this is the first time a private corporation has recovered a spacecraft they orbited, joining the ranks of a few space nations and the EU space agency. A great step forward for space travel. Hopefully everything continues to go well for them."

No, 'we' haven't proven much. Some governmental agencies around the world have proven that THEY can orbit the Earth, while you and I haven't done all that much to participate in that (buttefly effect does not count for much here.) SpaceX is a first here. Generalization - tool of choice of any critic.

Until now the only place you could throw money down on the table to buy a ride into space was with RKK Energia and flying out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. That was especially sad as it seems the former communists are the only ones who seem to understand capitalism and trying to fill a market demand.

SpaceX is the first American company to do so, as none of the other spacecraft manufacturers were even permitted, as a matter of law, to be able to sell their spacecraft except to government agencies where only t

Well, as reported elsewhere... If SpaceX can secure the funding they will design and build a super heavy lift which would give them capability of 120mT - 140mT to orbit. They're floating a fixed price of $2.5B for development and building the initial flight hardware. That's cheap compared to the current proposals for heavy lift vehicles that NASA is floating. If they can arrange for the funding, that gives us a vehicle in the Saturn V class (again) and it's game on.

You still need to get the raw materials into orbit for assembly. Which do you think is going to be the more efficient, cost effective, and (hopefully) less risky approach to an in-orbit assembly of a ~400mT space station like the ISS? Four launches of component parts at ~100mT apiece, or fourty launches at ~10mT?

Actually, I'd go with a "horses for courses" approach. If I wanted to lift low value, easy to replace and high mass raw materials for the superstructure into orbit I'd go for the heavy lift. Sensitive equipment with high value, long lead times and lower mass I'd want to spread across multiple smaller launches to minimise the impact of something going wrong. There's clearly a use for both approaches, so why not provide your prospective customers with a choice if you are in the business of commercial space

The problem with the heavy lift market is mainly the fixed costs of the infrastructure tend to eat up whatever cost savings come from the larger rockets. If you could launch a heavy lift vehicle on a regular schedule and put them into a huge mass production line, the advantage of sending up larger vehicles certainly has a huge impact in terms of sending stuff up in terms of recurring costs per kilo delivered to orbit. Larger vehicles certainly seem to do a much better job, but you have to get past those f

i think it all comes down to scale. even if we do in-orbit assembly (which would make sense for some stuff), we would need in-orbit fuel depots. It might well be more efficient to send up one ultra-heavy carrying 100 tons of fuel rather then three heavies each carrying 30 tons.

plus it would enable single launch moonshots and such. Doing in orbit assembly/staging with space stations and such might be slightly more versatile and economical, but it requires more infrastructure to be up there, most of which we

If we're going to do in orbit assembly way don't we just use a Verne Cannon to get the raw materials up into space, anything that's too fragile to be launched that way can be sent up in a more traditional method.

Portions of the bailout money could have gone to several different causes, doing far more good in the world than what it actually did, but the point is that it was called for by the mega-wealthy, to make themselves wealthier. The capitalist elite do not care about space exploration, world hunger, or any pressing social or scientific issues. They only care about themselves, and Congress has had a long-standing policy of trying to sate them, which is impossible to do.

There is no money in getting back to the moon, at least at this point. The principle driving force of the commercial space program is the generation of profit... Perfecting the space "tour" is what seems to be the first goal so the commercial company can get a cash cow going. I believe that the commercial space program will eventually want to get to the moon (and beyond), but right now I think it is all about just getting into space in manner that provides profit potential.

Double-check your facts. It's helium-3 that's in abundance on the Moon, not tritium. Helium-3 is a byproduct of tritium decay. Tritium has a short halflife and doesn't accumulate over geological timescales.

Tritium can be manufactured on Earth. Future fusion reactors (at least the magnetic confinement type, like ITER), will almost certainly test or operate lithium breeding blankets that'll produce tritium in abundance, and it'll hardly be worth millions of dollars a kilogram to ship a bulky product all the way back to Earth.

Oh yeah, and you need a reactor to burn it in too. Ignore all the stupid internet-crackpot garbage about Lew Rockwell, polywell, cold fusion and rubbish like that -- it's a super hard problem which will take billions of dollars and decades to solve.

Too bad the conservatives are doing their best to defund fusion research and limit the US' involvement in international fusion research.

Funny how that never seems to get mentioned when helium-3 is used as a rational to go to the moon....

On Slashdot, it almost always gets brought up. I do agree that the He-3 fanbois tend to forget that the technology to use the stuff on the Earth has yet to be invented.

There is a market for He-3 right now, but it is an incredibly small and niche market that would be flooded by any attempt to mine the stuff on the Moon. It has some interesting applications in the field of cryogenics as it liquefies at a lower temperature than He-4 (about the coldest boiling point for any substance in the universe) See also

The achievements themselves (launch, orbit, reentry) are not nearly as significant as the COST to perform these operations. Apollo and the shuttle cost many billions to develop. This company developed 2 rockets, a capsule, launch operations and production lines for roughly $600 Million. Barring a major Earth catastrophe, cost reduction is the only way to accelerate our reach into the stars.

What does "pioneering spirit" mean? I think in the formation of the USA it meant overcoming hardship to get land and become rich?

If this is what you mean I am guessing the bankers, entrepreneurs etc reckon there's better promise on good returns to be made down here, possibly with the exception of Richard Branson who reckons sub orbital flight will make him some money.

As for science, that's maybe a different issue from pioneering? I am sure the scientists would like some more money to do more space science b

That would be better stated, "... searching for trade routes, new products, and new land and resources to exploit."

The individual explorers were "adventurers". The people giving them ships and funding their explorations were looking for ROI. Guess which is harder to come by: pioneering spirit, or billions of dollars in investment capital to fund your pioneering adventures?

It isn't as if the concept of a business venture [wikipedia.org] to explore and develop new lands is necessarily a new concept that has never been tried before. Adding in about 400 years of inflation and relative economic strength of England in the early 17th Century to what America has for resources and capability for raising funds now in the 21st Century I think the ability to raise billions of dollars could certainly happen with a private venture with government backing. Mining Platinum metals group and other valuable

Our scientific missions seemed a lot more important and interesting on the moon with Apollo 17 in 1972.

The moon landings weren't really about science, they were about engineering and national pride. The Russians launched the first satellite, the first man in space, and the first man in orbit; we needed to beat them to the moon and prove that we could keep going there.

Not necessarily from the moon. From Mars? Sure. Of course we've gotten more data from the unmanned missions because *that's the only thing that's been there*.

The rovers have been a wonderful success, and the data they've brought back is invaluable, but realistically, what they've accomplished in YEARS could have been done by a human on the ground in a day or two max.

Unmanned exploration should be seen as a forerunner to manned. Something we send out in advance of our arrival, not instead of it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for manned missions. I'm just pointing out that we can get a lot of science done without manning every mission. Here's [nasa.gov] the NASA page on moon science.

The rovers have been a wonderful success, and the data they've brought back is invaluable, but realistically, what they've accomplished in YEARS could have been done by a human on the ground in a day or two max.

It takes more than a day or two to return from Mars. AND, the rover mission was scheduled to last six months. A six month ma

Bingo. Lets the bots do the grunt work, so that why you finally have spaceboots on the ground, they have clear, well defined objectives, so they can do the maximum amount of science during their stay on the surface.

"Of course we've gotten more data from the unmanned missions because *that's the only thing that's been there*."

That's the fucking point. It's also the only thing that has a realistic chance of going there in my lifetime. Which people don't seem to want to understand or accept.

I have no doubt that a human could do a massive amount of science on Mars. It would also cost a massive amount of money that we aren't going to spend. As a geologist I would love to see it happen. I also know it is the definition

Yes, we did get quite a bit of science of of them, despite the fact that that's not what they were really for.

I think we both agree on that. The point I'm making is that motive and goals are not tied to scientific outcome. This is particularly relevant to your claim that the US's unmanned missions have been better scientifically than its manned ones. As I see it, the Apollo program has done more to expand our knowledge of the Solar System outside of the Sun than the rest of space science missions put together. Yes, it's bigger than all the rest put together. Here's the key two words: "sample return".

Adding to this, by having a professionally trained and competent geologist actually there on the Moon, able to hand pick samples, putting them into geological context with other rocks, and to literally run his fingers through the regolith, and to even smell and taste the samples (something video doesn't do a really good job of)... I don't see how that is possible to duplicate something of that nature with a robotic probe. The proposal to have a tele-operated humanoid robot on the Moon does sound like somet

You're right of course, and the pursuit of knowledge is great. And we certainly use much of what we learn for applications here on Earth. It's just that many believe those missions should be working up to something spectacular and inspiring. For example, feats that appear to herald space travel resembling what we see in science fiction. A silly dream in the short term of course, but that's why the Virgin Galactic and SpaceX flights are

The point, I think, is to get the government institutions (who are the ones who don't have to make money at things) OUT of the business of doing repetitious, potentially profitable things. Like putting satellites into orbit, doing ISS supply runs, and other generic things that are pretty much routine these days.

If they are barred from doing easy stuff, maybe they will take their budget where it is supposed to go: into exploration and the development of new things, things that the the private industry won't do because there is no profit there yet.

Okay, we have proven we can orbit the Earth successfully for the past 37 years. NOW we have to move on to landing back on the Moon and Mars.Whatever happened to our pioneering spirit in space? Are we just going to build un-manned shuttles and satellites for the next 50 years?

NASA/US Government, yes, done, out of the game. They'll say otherwise, but look at behaviors, not rhetoric.

Enter SpaceX... private industry will now make the manned advances. Elon Musk can now fund Moon R&D with revenues from comm

A big step - only two more launches and the capsule is man rated, and we have a seven person scaled up version of an Apollo atop a Saturn Ib, easily capable of reaching the ISS with a full crew. Then all we need is a new version of the Saturn V, and we have essentially all the capability we lost in the 70's and 80's, scaled by 7/3rds. (OK, to do an actual lunar mission, we need a LEM, but there, exact duplicates of the original, flawless design would do - let's hope the Gruman design sheets are still around

> (OK, to do an actual lunar mission, we need a LEM, but there, exact duplicates of the original, flawless design would do - let's hope the Gruman design sheets are still around).

As I mentioned in another comment, during the press conference Elon Musk said that the next-generation Dragon will be capable of powered landings. This would allow it to function as, or at least serve as a predecessor to, a lunar lander (or even Mars lander).

(OK, to do an actual lunar mission, we need a LEM, but there, exact duplicates of the original, flawless design would do - let's hope the Gruman design sheets are still around).

For that matter there's at least one still around that was never used. (Wouldn't be flightworthy, but it could be reverse engineered.) But while the Block II LMs were pretty darn good, I'd go with lighter electronics and lithium hydroxide canisters that matched the ones in the command module (ie Dragon) -- just in case.

One of the goals of SpaceX is to not only put a human on Mars (Elon Musk is shooting for 2020), but to make space flight affordable enough to allow people to move to Mars.

“One of the long-term goals of SpaceX is, ultimately, to get the price of transporting people and product to Mars to be low enough and with a high enough reliability that if somebody wanted to sell all their belongings and move to a new planet and forge a new civilisation they could do so.”

There's an island a few miles off the coast of New England that's a popular destination for sea kayakers. They have proven that we can perform a successful traversal to and from that island. NOW they have have to move on to going to Greenland and back.

See how extravagant that mode of argument is? It's not that the Greenland expedition isn't worth somebody's attention, but if it is ever done it will be done for entirely different reasons. And if those guys really need to go to Greenland, they have a more pr

Whatever happened to our pioneering spirit in space? Are we just going to build un-manned shuttles and satellites for the next 50 years?

And the fact we have robots crawling around the surface of Mars, and orbiters studying the depths of the Venusian atmosphere, doesn't impress you?

Sending meaty fleshy humans to distant worlds is exciting, and certainly can get things done. But in terms of pure science, I think we're following the right track with our robots. There's not much scientific gain in sending yet another can of humans to the Moon; you get far more scientific bang for your buck with swarms of probes.

* The heat shield on the Dragon capsule is massively overengineered to survive not only reentry velocities from low-Earth orbit, but also the much faster velocities from Lunar or Martian return trajectories.

* Instead of solely relying on parachutes, the next generation of the Dragon capsule will incorporate thrusters which will allow it to make a precise landing on the ground,

First and foremost, SpaceX achieved its funding through voluntary means, quite the opposite from how governments achieve their funding.

That's right: Investors voluntarily invest their money in SpaceX. But they do it mainly based on the expectation that SpaceX will win fat government contracts, so they can repay these same investors with a larger amount of money involuntarily extracted from the taxpayers.

First and foremost, SpaceX achieved its funding through voluntary means, quite the opposite from how governments achieve their funding.

That's right: Investors voluntarily invest their money in SpaceX. But they do it mainly based on the expectation that SpaceX will win fat government contracts, so they can repay these same investors with a larger amount of money involuntarily extracted from the taxpayers.

...in exchange for providing services to the government--services the government would have demanded anyway--and in competition with other entities, spurring innovation and driving down cost, while also offering to the same service to other entities the private sector.

Or are you saying that everybody who ever sold a product to a government is morally identical to that government creating that product itself?

That's right: Investors voluntarily invest their money in SpaceX. But they do it mainly based on the expectation that SpaceX will win fat government contracts, so they can repay these same investors with a larger amount of money involuntarily extracted from the taxpayers.

On the contrary, prior to SpaceX winning the COTS contracts the development of the Falcon 9 was well underway and being developed for other markets besides trying to win government contracts. Simply put, SpaceX built the rocket and then said to the government: "do you want to come along for a ride?"

Folks like ATK and even Boeing and Lockheed-Martin all send out what are called "cost-plus" contracts where they don't even have an engineer look at the proposal until after there is an RFP "out there", and the

The POIC (and probably every other NASA center with a TV) had the launch up on the big screen. Scott Kelly, the USOS crew on the ISS right now, took a break and watched it live on the feed we sent up to him between LOS's.

Scott asked CAPCOM to give the SpaceX team his congratulations on a successful launch. We in the ISS community are doubly excited: not only is it great to see such a flawless launch, but the Dragon/Falcon 9 is key to our future logistics and science return!

The summary seems to indicate that there is an European Union (EU) space agency. Although many members of EU are members of the ESA, not all EU members are members of ESA, and there are members of the ESA that are not members of the EU (Norway and Switzerland).

Beat me to the punch. Lots of people mix up the EU and the ESA, same as the mix up the EU and the Eurozone.

What NASA, ESA and USSR/Russia have done that SpaceX thus far hasn't is automated docking. That's not a trivial step at all (the Chinese, for instance, haven't done it yet, and are taking their sweet time making sure they get it right). Presumably they've got plans in this regard if they want to resupply the ISS.

As impressive as it is, really these days its a question of time and money, and having a fa

I have heard some people talk about trying to put some more direct EU involvement into the ESA, as there are projects which can benefit the European Union as a whole which involve spaceflight. Nothing serious and I do understand where the confusion comes from.

Like almost all pan-European organizations, not everything is nearly as clear as it would seem and most European organizations are not nearly as tightly run from a central bureaucracy like is the case in America... which is certainly where much of the

I'm always skeptical of 'free market genius' because of externalities. A government agency, in a functioning democracy, has to account for itself pretty tightly, and the entire society its in are counted as stakeholders. A private corporation only really answers to its shareholders and can dump off its costs elsewhere.

In the case of SpaceX, the big externality is R&D cost. I find it amusing they boast of both being privately funded, whilst at the same time making a big deal of the super-reliable pintle

Hey, as taxpayers they (or more likely, their parents) paid for that pintle injector R&D. Nothing wrong with a government agency doing R&D, so long as results are made available to the taxpayers. It's when it gets into operations that its efficiency (and motives) becomes suspect.

Plenty of aircraft companies built on eg the airfoil work that NACA did back when, but we didn't need a government agency to create and run the airlines.

Elon has already said he would turn down the chance. The argument he made is that as CEO and the primary financier for the company that if he died making an attempt going to orbit that it would put a whole bunch of people that he cares about into the unemployment lines.

He also made a further comment that once this company and the other enterprises are a little better established (Solar City and Tesla Motors) that he might consider making a trip, but certainly not as the first person up in the spacecraft.

Why is it better for the US Government to pay a corporation to build spacecraft?

People always give the line that corporations are more efficient, but I don't really see why. Not only are they likely to shell out big bucks to their execs, but they also have to get enough money selling products/services to the government to make a profit. NASA doesn't have to make a profit, so they're providing the service to the government at cost.

Saying that private entities are cheaper for the government to use becau

For Boeing and Lockheed Martin they end up being part of the supply chain and because of that they have no incentive to build cheap and fly cheap, their goal is to create and sell high because someone else is going to pay for it and often deal with it. If SpaceX puts their own people in the air with their own hardware, they have the motivation to keep prices low and when it comes around to getting other people and things in orbit, sell high.

Nasa doesn't build much. they have always had to use private companies to do the actual building. Due to the way those contracts work, the contractors have little motivation to do anything but maximize profit from that contract, where as a purely privately funded company has to answer to it's shareholders.

Space X saved a lot of money not by cutting corners, but by vertical integration. They build as much as they can in house, rather then having to buy and ship stuff form dozens of makers all over th

Why is it better for the US Government to pay a corporation to build spacecraft?

People always give the line that corporations are more efficient, but I don't really see why. Not only are they likely to shell out big bucks to their execs, but they also have to get enough money selling products/services to the government to make a profit. NASA doesn't have to make a profit, so they're providing the service to the government at cost.

Saying that private entities are cheaper for the government to use because private entities need to make a profit seems backwards to me.

How many private entities have the ability to either print money or seize money from others through force (taxes)?

That's why the private sector is more efficient: even with profits, private entities still have to work within budgets. Governments don't earn money, governments take money, and if they have cost overruns, they can just take more. Where's the incentive to be efficient?

> Why is it better for the US Government to pay a corporation to build spacecraft?

You seem to have a somewhat idealized view of how the US government operates.

In the government's case, a rocket/spacecraft is designed to garner political support -- you won't get funding for the rocket unless it meets the demands of politically-powerful congressmen and creates as many jobs as possible in their congressional districts. For example, with the Shuttle and Shuttle-legacy vehicles, you have (perhaps most importa

Reductio ad Hitlerum, also argumentum ad Hitlerum, (dog Latin for "reduction to Hitler" or "argument to Hitler," respectively) is an ad hominem or ad misericordiam argument, and is an informal fallacy. It is a fallacy of irrelevance where a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone's origin rather than its current meaning or context. This overlooks any difference to be found in the present situation, typically transferring the positive or negative esteem from the earlier context. Hence th

Everything was coming to this. It's normal to assume that what was done by governments before will one day be done by commercial companies.

If you can get some ROI on it, there's obviously a decent market for satellite launches. And making deliveries to ISS, but that's demand all generated by the government. Maybe you can get some space hotels in LEO, but for everything else like sending out probes, going back to the Moon or to Mars there's not really been many realistic business plans, even if you count on playboy billionaires.

There's lots of services I don't see the private industry ever overtaking from the public like courts, police, CPS and

If you can get some ROI on it, there's obviously a decent market for satellite launches. And making deliveries to ISS, but that's demand all generated by the government. Maybe you can get some space hotels in LEO, but for everything else like sending out probes, going back to the Moon or to Mars there's not really been many realistic business plans, even if you count on playboy billionaires.

Today. What about tomorrow? Keep in mind that fifty years ago, a commercial market for satellites fell into the "not really many realistic business plans" realm. Things change even in the space industry. Just because it's not profitable today, doesn't mean that it'll always be unprofitable.

Sure, but those future changes are going to result from non-profit oriented exploration. There's just nowhere near enough knowledge about the resources available or the costs of extracting/shipping them for a for-profit business to invest. The upfront costs are enormous, the expected payoffs are very hard to calculate, and the various risks are immense.

A good analogy is fusion research. The amounts of money required to make serious progress are immense (although probably small compared to what a manned mars

Sure, but those future changes are going to result from non-profit oriented exploration. There's just nowhere near enough knowledge about the resources available or the costs of extracting/shipping them for a for-profit business to invest. The upfront costs are enormous, the expected payoffs are very hard to calculate, and the various risks are immense.

I have to disagree. I think we're entering a phase where commercial development will on its own be ample incentive for developments such as the above. It might not be as fast or convenient as using someone else's money to do the heavy lifting, but I think there's a pathway for incremental space development to give us space.

I don't see the incremental steps between low earth orbit and serious interplanetary travel. The jump between them is huge, both literally in the distance you must travel, and figuratively, in the types of engineering challenges that need to be solved. And there's not many places worth stopping on the way.

I'm looking forwards to the commercialization of LEO. It's definitely going to be awesome, and I think that once it gets going it will get crowded up there relatively quickly. But the leap from LEO to Mars

I don't see the incremental steps between low earth orbit and serious interplanetary travel. The jump between them is huge, both literally in the distance you must travel, and figuratively, in the types of engineering challenges that need to be solved. And there's not many places worth stopping on the way.

Let's just look at the incremental possibilities just from a space tourism point of view:

1) Suborbital space tourism - a few minutes of zero gravity. Can be grown into a new, faster alternative to air flight.
2) Orbital space tourism - hours to weeks to years in orbit. Also, provides a big opportunity for zero gravity space science.
3) Lunar orbit - relatively easy once you've mastered Earth orbit. Swing some tourists on a trip around around the Moon and back.

4) Lunar trips to surface - the first trips might be a few hours, but eventually extending to stays of weeks or longer.
5) Trips to near Earth asteroids - these targets have relatively low delta-v. Once you've mastered living in deep space (outside of Earth's magnetic field) for weeks and have rockets that can get you to lunar orbit and back, you're pretty much ready for a trip to one of the many nearby asteroids.

At this point, you can start trying in situ resource utilization, that is, living off the land. Both the Moon and asteroids provide raw materials that a hotel or outpost could use to replace some m0aterial shipped from Earth. You've also have figured out radiation shielding, closed life support, and other issues of long term living in deep space.

6) Mars orbit - even if you can't figure out how to land safely, you can still reach Mars orbit and visit the Martian moons.
7) Mars landing - land and live on another world.
8) Asteroid belt - only marginally more difficult than Mars to reach. Trojan asteroids are a bit harder again.

At this point, you should be able to fly by all the major planets out to Jupiter or perhaps Saturn. With fission power, you probably can visit any point currently known in the Solar System.

There are a series of incremental steps taking tourists to the Moon, Mars, NEAs, and beyond. The really hard part is just getting established in low Earth orbit and figuring out how to live indefinitely in space without immediate access to Earth supply.

On the contrary, the leap from LEO to elsewhere is relatively benign. Also, there are places like the Lunar-Earth Lagragian points and GEO which offer some in-between stages from which you can build space stations or other kinds of facilities that would be useful in their own ways. Yes, those places do have their own challenges, but they can be overcome.

The delta-v budget [wikipedia.org]simply getting from the surface of the Earth to LEO is actually more than getting from the LEO to Phobos. Fusion power simply gets you

Ok, but the "hard part" isn't just a bigger rocket, it's more the serious amount of time required to get there, and the resources required to keep a human being alive that long. You can take everything you need to last you on a trip to the moon.

There's a ton of problems to be solved, and testing the various solutions is going to be slow and really expensive. This isn't like Edison trying a thousand different materials before finding a proper filament for an electric lightbulb. You're talking about years of

I agree that there are many problems going to other places, but nothing that is insurmountable.

Not only that, but it will also be important to extract resources from where you are at and to "recycle" the things that you have to make them last longer. This can include things like Oxygen, Hydrogen, Carbon, and Nitrogen. Apparently the only element really missing from the Moon is a reasonable quantity of Nitrogen, and the presence of some ammonia from the various probes that have gone to the Moon recently su

A good analogy is fusion research. The amounts of money required to make serious progress are immense (although probably small compared to what a manned mars mission would cost), but the potential payoffs if you were successful are huge and obvious. And while there are various companies dabbling in it, you don't see huge projects from big companies pouring money into figuring it out. Mostly because it's such a risky investment that corporations can't justify it.

And if fusion power research can't pull in that kind of funding, then what hope does interplanetary exploration have? The costs are higher, the risks are higher, and the payoffs are questionable. Any CEO who tried to shovel serious money towards it would be replaced faster than he could write the first check.

Fusion research is a bad analogy. First, it's not profitable in any way and at least decades from that becoming true. OTOH, the satellite business is profitable now even in the absence of non-profits and government funds. There's also some obvious near future markets such as space tourism that are likely to be profitable.

Nor does one have to hope with spaceflight that not only does it become cost effective, but that it can beat the competitors. Fusion has other base load competitors such as fission power

I was commenting on interplanetary trips, not on spaceflight in general. There's definitely some shorter term, profitable enterprises available in low earth orbit. But the step from LEO to interplanetary travel is a lot bigger than most people think. It's not just a matter of scaling up, if it was, we'd have put people on mars decades ago. Also, the businesses that are finding success in LEO now have certainly benefited from the early exploratory work done by governments, they're not blazing a 100% new trai

My point about fusion is simply that there's nothing in fusion that currently makes money. With space flight, there are some things that already make money. So it's the less difficult problem of expanding the current niches rather than creating them from whole cloth.

But the step from LEO to interplanetary travel is a lot bigger than most people think. It's not just a matter of scaling up, if it was, we'd have put people on mars decades ago.

I disagree. It is a matter of scaling up. The Apollo program cost something like 100 to 150 billion in today's dollars. A Mars program using the same approach and funding structure would have been about an order of magnitude larger (I recall NAS

Ok, but Apollo wasn't really good for much except a quick trip there and back. While I disagree that you could just "scale up" Apollo and go to Mars (turning a trip of a few days into years is rather significant), even if you managed to make it work, you're not going to turn a profit just by bringing back a couple hundred kilograms of mars rock.

Chemical rockets can only realistically scale up so far. The amount of hardware that you'd need to get into space for a trip to mars is huge.

Chemical rockets can only realistically scale up so far. The amount of hardware that you'd need to get into space for a trip to mars is huge.

It's just mass. You need more launches and modest orbital assembly, not a completely new approach. Somewhere between three and eight Saturn V launches gives you the mass for a four man expedition to Mars.

... but for everything else like sending out probes, going back to the Moon or to Mars there's not really been many realistic business plans, even if you count on playboy billionaires.

It's possible that funding could come from traditional research centres, such as Universities with corporate goodwill backing- but you'd be talking about an awful lot of interested Uni's needing to club together to afford a decent interplanetary research project.

But then, there's no reason why the science shouldn't continue to be government funded. I know "small government" sentiment is scarily prevalent in some US political circles, but there's really nothing wrong with scientists (i.e., working on projec

Plus, they have the advantage that they are bound to protect you. In the US, the Supreme Court has ruled that police have no duty to protect any individual, only "society," a few special people, and those imprisoned by them. Even if you have a restraining order that commands the police to take action, you are not considered special enough. (See Warren vs. DC, Hartzler vs City of San Jose, Riss vs. New York, DeShaney vs. Winnebago County Department of Social Services; there are plenty of other)